Message-Id: <199605151922.PAA23749@postman.osf.org>
To: www-html@w3.org
Cc: abigail@tungsten.gn.iaf.nl
Subject: Re: Spacing
Date: Wed, 15 May 1996 15:22:19 -0400
From: Stavros Macrakis <macrakis@osf.org>
I suggested using non-breaking space for multiple spaces. Abigail
<abigail@tungsten.gn.iaf.nl> rightly corrected me, saying:
...the HTML 3.0 description says that a non-breaking space should
behave as normal space, with the exception of breaking a line at that
point. Hence, "&nbps;&nbps;" should display as " " (one space).
Thanks for the correction. I found (thank you, Alta Vista) some
additional discussion of this at:
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/%7Eflavell/iso8859/iso8859-pointers.html#nbsp
Apparently I am not the only one to have made this error. I do
wonder, though, whether this is the appropriate definition to
standardize on. Non-breaking space has the advantage of being a
standard 8859-1 character, and requiring no special processing by most
software, unlike entities like &emsp;, which cannot be represented in
8859-1 (although they are available in Unicode, I believe).
As for Walter Ian Kaye's <boo@best.com> objection that non-breaking
space is not code 32 (decimal), and therefore can't be used for
cutting and pasting code, yes, that is true, but if you want to
preserve the code at that level, I don't see how you're going to be
able to do anything but <PRE>, as my comment-alignment example showed.
-s